Autumn reading list: The Booker Prize 2020 shortlist
This autumn will be like no other in the world of books. It seems that no matter how many books you read during the lockdown – 2 or 200 – there are way too many books and not enough hours in the day. One of the first, and perhaps easiest, places to start putting together an autumn reading list is with the flood of autumn fiction under consideration for famed literary prizes. Cue the Booker Prize 2020 Shortlist.
About the Booker Prize 2020 shortlist
The Booker Prize 2020 shortlist has been announced, and it comprises a history-making group of writers for the prize. Four of the writers are debut authors, four are women, and four are from ethnic minority backgrounds – making this the most diverse shortlist in consideration for the Booker Prize.
Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body is the third and final instalment in a trilogy that tells the story of Tambu, a woman navigating postcolonial Zimbabwe. (Dangarembga, who is Zimbabwean, was arrested in Harare, the nation’s capital, in July while protesting government corruption.) Mengiste’s The Shadow King is the Ethiopian American writer’s second novel. Set right before the second Italo-Ethiopian War, it tells the story of a woman who guards the titular “shadow king,” a man impersonating an exiled Ethiopian leader. (Her first, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, was published back in 2010.)